Game ideas?

[Viera Champion]

Okay, so I just got my own computer for the first time in my life (Macbook Pro that runs Lion) through a 1:1 program my school is doing. I am allowed to download anything I wish as long as it is legal and won't harm the computer.

I really want to download League of Legends, but as I found it like months ago, it is only available for Windows. Kind of upsetting. So to make me less upset, I was hoping I could get some suggestions from you guys on other games I could download. For free.

[endoperez]

There's a subforum for PC and Mac games, and this would fit much better there. You might also want to edit the first post so that the title mentions that this is for Mac.

Battle for Wesnoth is a free fantasy turn-based strategy game.

There's various roguelikes, or dungeon crawling games. If you're not familiar with them, download Dungeon Crawl's tile version.

Ur-Quan Masters is a good one too. It's a remake of Star Control 2, made with the original developers' blessings. It's hard to describe, though. It's something like a scifi JRPG, but with Asteroids-style arcade shooting instead of turn-based combat.

There might be ways of running League of Legends on a Mac. Ask about it on the League of Legends thread. It's not officially supported so there might be some technical issues, but it's worth looking into.

[Beans]

If you don't mind Doom-era games and being scared out of your wits, Marathon is freeware. The whole trilogy!

[Top cat]

Ascendancy! Classic turn based 4x space game, complete with different races with unique abilities, and colonisable planets going into three digits. Plus you can blast enemy ships with a plasmatron, who wouldn't want to use something called a plasmatron? You'll need DOSBOX, but that's also free and quick to setup (though with a bit of learning curve if you haven't used DOS).

There's also Civilization 2, you'd probably be able to get that for free now. Great game.

[Trazoi]

Spelunky has been ported to the Mac, if you're up for some platformer rogue-like goodness.

Cave Story was ported to the Mac, and is definitely worth playing. If you really like it (it's great) there's a new improved Cave Story Plus version out for sale for $10 or so, but the free version is still as awesome as it ever was.

If you've got some older DOS games then DOSBox works fine on a Mac too.

[Viera Champion]

Downloaded Battle for Wesnoth. It is pretty fun.

I would download more, but I am currently very peeved that EA Games just stole twenty dollars from me. I tried to purchase and download spore from them, but when I clicked download, it linked me to nowhere, and conveniently neither the Origin website nor EA Games gives me any information to contact them, and the only form of help I can get is a generic FAQ with no solution to my problem, and a very small bug/issue section on the EA Games' forum that the staff NEVER take the time to go and reply in. Anger and disappointment abound. I rally wanted that game after I used up a whole fifty dollar gift card to buy the actual disc forever ago, but my brother went and lost it.:small mad:

Never go digital shopping for games again.

[Tavar]

Okay, first off, make sure that the money was actually sent somewhere. If it wasn't, then something goofed, but no harm, no foul. If it was, then you should contact them directly(phone is a good bet).

[Trazoi]

Ouch. If you've sent them the money I'd definitely get on them. They seem to be focusing everything into their "Talk to an advisor" option. Calling them might be quicker but check on what the phone charges are (the price of calling EA from where I am means a ten minute call would be more expensive than what you paid for Spore.)

For the record I buy games online all the time, from Steam, GOG, and various indies and indie bundles and haven't had an issue with any of them, so don't be too disheartened by digital game shopping in general. It usually doesn't suck.
(BTW Steam has a Mac client, nearly all the DOS games at GOG should run on a Mac, and many indies support Macs.)

[factotum]

Never go digital shopping for games again.

See, that's a bit of a shame because I was about to recommend you check Steam out--they have quite a few games that will run on the Mac that you could check out. If you change your mind, here's the link:

http://store.steampowered.com/browse/mac/

[Mx.Silver]

I would point you towards the top-down space sime Escape Velocity: Nova. Hell, if you own a Mac you kind of have to try an Escape Velocity game at some point. The Demo's free, pretty comprehensive and not a very large download so there's not a lot holding you back (biggest hurdle will probably be the controls at first).

[Top cat]

I found spore really disappointing personally. If you end up with a refund, I wouldn't buy it again if I were you.

[Viera Champion]

I found spore really disappointing personally. If you end up with a refund, I wouldn't buy it again if I were you.

Really? When I owned the CD-Rom back in the day, I loved it. That's why I wanted to download it.

[Top cat]

Well, it was fun for a few hours, but the space stage was really poorly done and pretty much meant the game was reduced to 4 quite good minigames and a conquer-the-galaxy-one-planet-at-a-time-manually sort of stage. Maybe I was expecting too much, after hearing about spore I wanted to exterminate all life in the galaxy with some insecty things with claws and blasters. Technically I could still sort of do that, but it would take 34895734985734 years. The huge customisation didn't help much either seeing as hardly any of it had a practical effect.

Of course, you are not me, and everything I said may be invalid. But spore never struck me as having great replay value.

[Kato]

Ascendancy! Classic turn based 4x space game, complete with different races with unique abilities, and colonisable planets going into three digits. Plus you can blast enemy ships with a plasmatron, who wouldn't want to use something called a plasmatron? You'll need DOSBOX, but that's also free and quick to setup (though with a bit of learning curve if you haven't used DOS).

Oh, I loved that game... to bad the AI was so terrible... it had so much promise *sigh*

[Top cat]

There's apparently some patch for the AI? I haven't ever found/used it though.

[Radar]

There's apparently some patch for the AI? I haven't ever found/used it though.

There is and it's not that hard to find.

[Top cat]

I didn't look very hard :|

[Kato]

Hu, never heard of that. Sounds like a neat thing to try. Yay.

[Tusalu]

Team Fortress 2 is free now. And available for mac. And it's great.

[Lifeson]

Need an RPG? Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden. If only for the fact that a Chaos Dunk ended the world and outlawed basketball. Yes, the game is canon.

There are ways of running League of Legends on a mac, my favourite method is just to simply dual-boot into Windows. :P Cheating, I know, but it works stupidly well.

[Makensha]

Black Shades
Engima
Quinn (Tetris)
Lumen
N
Neverball
Stepmania
Freeciv
RunMan: Race Around the World

I think FreeDoom might run on Mac, but don't quote me.

All Unity games should work if you download the software.

Nexuiz and Tremulous are good if you want classic multiplayer FPS action.

Yeah, I had this problem too at one point (though the mac beta for LoL was around then).
There's one I'm forgetting, but I'll post again if I remember.

Warning: Neverball will suck your life away. You will cry, you will scream, you will throw things, and then you will restart the level and try again.

[Trazoi]

I think FreeDoom might run on Mac, but don't quote me.

The original Doom works fine on a Mac under Dosbox (I'm running it right now), so even if the native MacOS port doesn't work the DOS ones probably will.

And I didn't know Runman: Race Around the World worked on a Mac, that's great!

[Top cat]

How did you get doom to run on dosbox? Tried that myself, I got "this is a windows exe file". I really wanted to play it again as well :(

[factotum]

How did you get doom to run on dosbox? Tried that myself, I got "this is a windows exe file". I really wanted to play it again as well :(

Sounds like you were trying to run WinDOOM--you need the original DOS version to run under DOSBox. Or do you mean you were getting that error when you tried to run DOSBox in the first place?

[Top cat]

My version was ultimate doom for windows 95. I tried it anyway because might as well, and of course it didn't work.

However, after posting I quickly found a DOS version (hey, I own the game anyway) and am now knee deep in the dead :)

[Tyndmyr]

Dungeon Defenders...fantastic, I play it on xbox, but I believe it's also available on PC. Great combo of tower defense and hack n slash.

[Lord Seth]

I recommend NetHack. I've actually had a number of Windows users complain that the graphical ("tiles") interface for it is inferior to the Mac version.

I also recommend checking out Antares. It's a freeware Mac OS X port of Ares (a pretty fun pre-OS X game). It has its bugs, but nothing gamebreaking that I've discovered.

[Mando Knight]

Dungeon Defenders...fantastic, I play it on xbox, but I believe it's also available on PC. Great combo of tower defense and hack n slash.

Shiro needs games that play on a Mac. (Which is an inherent problem to buying a Mac and expecting to play games on it: the number of games that have a Mac port are on an order of magnitude less than those that are available for PC. Another is that you pay through the teeth to get a MacBook that has gaming capabilities comparable to high-end PC laptops... see spoiler for details on trade study)

For access to Mac-compatible games, I would recommend grabbing Steam and filtering by Mac, as linked above.

Spoiler

Show

All figures as given by manufacturers
{table=head]Parameter|MacBook Pro 15"|Dell XPS 15
CPU|Intel i7 2.2 GHz|Intel i7 2.2 GHz
RAM|8 GB DDR3|8 GB DDR3
GPU|Radeon HD 6670M|GeForce 570M
Video memory|512 MB|2 GB
Screen resolution|1680x1050|1920x1080
Storage|256 GB Solid-State|255 GB Solid-State
Optical Drive|8x DVD+/-R|8x DVD+/-R
OS|OS X Lion|64 bit Win 7 Home Premium
Battery|Built-in, 7 hr|90 WHr 9-cell, 10 hr
Support|1 yr|1 yr
Keyboard|Backlit|Backlit
Camera|720p (.9 MP)|2 MP
Bluetooth|3.0|3.0
Wireless|n|n, 3G
Thunderbolt|1|0
USB 3.0|0|1
USB 2.0|2|1
Video out|Thunderbolt, Mini DisplayPort|HDMI, Mini DisplayPort
Trackpad|Mac Multi-Touch|Standard*
Price (USD)|$2699.00|$1559.99[/table]
*Specs not mentioned on site

So, all-in-all, fairly comparable... except you're paying over a thousand for that brand name. To bring the Dell up to a more comparable price, I added the full Office 2010 suite, a 24" monitor, upgraded integrated sound, facial recognition software, a Logitech wireless mouse, and a 2-year support package. Then I got $2682.97...

[Pokonic]

Wesnoth is a nice one, good community to boot.

Dwarf Fortress is a nice pick, albet only if your willing to stand learning a whole new was to use a keyboard in ways you would not dream of. Nightmares, yes.

[Viera Champion]

Shiro needs games that play on a Mac. (Which is an inherent problem to buying a Mac and expecting to play games on it: the number of games that have a Mac port are on an order of magnitude less than those that are available for PC. Another is that you pay through the teeth to get a MacBook that has gaming capabilities comparable to high-end PC laptops... see spoiler for details on trade study)

For access to Mac-compatible games, I would recommend grabbing Steam and filtering by Mac, as linked above.

Spoiler

Show

All figures as given by manufacturers
{table=head]Parameter|MacBook Pro 15"|Dell XPS 15
CPU|Intel i7 2.2 GHz|Intel i7 2.2 GHz
RAM|8 GB DDR3|8 GB DDR3
GPU|Radeon HD 6670M|GeForce 570M
Video memory|512 MB|2 GB
Screen resolution|1680x1050|1920x1080
Storage|256 GB Solid-State|255 GB Solid-State
Optical Drive|8x DVD+/-R|8x DVD+/-R
OS|OS X Lion|64 bit Win 7 Home Premium
Battery|Built-in, 7 hr|90 WHr 9-cell, 10 hr
Support|1 yr|1 yr
Keyboard|Backlit|Backlit
Camera|720p (.9 MP)|2 MP
Bluetooth|3.0|3.0
Wireless|n|n, 3G
Thunderbolt|1|0
USB 3.0|0|1
USB 2.0|2|1
Video out|Thunderbolt, Mini DisplayPort|HDMI, Mini DisplayPort
Trackpad|Mac Multi-Touch|Standard*
Price (USD)|$2699.00|$1559.99[/table]
*Specs not mentioned on site

So, all-in-all, fairly comparable... except you're paying over a thousand for that brand name. To bring the Dell up to a more comparable price, I added the full Office 2010 suite, a 24" monitor, upgraded integrated sound, facial recognition software, a Logitech wireless mouse, and a 2-year support package. Then I got $2682.97...

Not paying anything though, nor did I have a choice in computer. My school is trying to start a program where they give every student their own laptop for as long as they are attending the school. I got mine early as I joined the tech support club, and thus we have been given computers as a test for next year.